Forget hybrid cars. Hybrid films are replacing the environmentally-friendly vehicles with a trendiness all their own. An increasingly popular genre, hybrid movies are fictitious films masquerading as reality, often using untrained actors and actual footage. September Tapes, previewed at Visions Cinema Monday, serves as the mother of all hybrids and claims to be the first feature film shot in an active war zone.
Directed by Christian Johnston and produced in part by the New America Foundation, a public policy institute located in D.C., September Tapes was filmed in Afghanistan in the summer of 2002, just months after the U.S. strikes against the Taliban. According to the foundation’s website, the filmmakers went to Afghanistan “to work through the trauma everybody was feeling about the terrorist attacks of that day the best way they knew how-through filmmaking.” The result is a movie that leaves audiences wondering why compelling stories were buried under a stinted plot.
The plot line of September Tapes is simple, if extreme. The premise is that eight video tapes have been discovered on the Pakistani border. The tapes reveal the odyssey of Don Larson, a young and simpleminded New Yorker, who sells everything he owns after September 11, 2001 and hops on a plane to Afghanistan, picking up a translator and a cameraman on the way. Larson’s plans are unclear; he claims to want to learn why Sept. 11 happened, but is sporting an AK-47 hunting down the bad guys only days later. Larson keeps the audience grimacing as he continually plays the part of the American cowboy. He stays out after curfew, engages in shady gun deals and gets thrown in jail. Then there’s his worst idea of all-following a bounty hunter off into the wilds to find Bin Laden himself. Like the filmmakers, Larson wants answers, and his strategy is to throw himself into a battle he doesn’t understand.
September Tapes is fiction with the goals of a documentary, and thus a hybrid. The goal, according to the website, was “to tell the story we weren’t getting on the nightly news. They were filmmakers and actors and cameramen. They had a script. Most of it wasn’t used.” But this lack of script doesn’t work to the film’s advantage. The images it presents are misleading, not real. The advantage of fiction is its capacity to create a storyline that relates truth in an inventive way. The truths that September Tapes presents are only glimpses of confusion, culture shock and hostility. Americans bent on revenge aren’t roaming the streets of Kabul on a quest to hunt down the evil-doers.
If Larson’s character remains stagnant throughout the film, the other characters barely materialize onscreen. The Afghani-American translator, for example, is a major role that is never developed. We know that Wali has an American wife he misses, that he gets frustrated with Larson’s antics and that he seems to suffer multiple nervous breakdowns out of fear. Why Wali agreed to help Larson is never explained. It’s only Larson’s eyes we’re invited to see through, so we don’t escape our bubble of media images after all.
As a faux-documentary with serious aims, September Tapes follows in the tradition of films like In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) which tracks two boys’ attempt to emigrate to Great Britain from the refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan. In This World and September Tapes blur the lines between reality and fiction. What footage is real? Who really lives and dies? What lines were scripted and what just happened? September Tapes, however, portrays a much more drastic situation than the refugees’ odyssey, because the protagonist continually puts himself in harm’s way. Who could expect anything but the worst to happen to Larson?
It’s unfortunate that a movie like September Tapes couldn’t have a more insightful narrator-like an Afghani. Who better to tell the story than a citizen of the country? Maybe the writers feared that audiences wouldn’t identify with someone in an environment so removed, but they can hardly identify with the gun-toting Larson. The movie is so improbable, the story would be worthwhile only if it were real.
